Blind Lake (38 page)

Coming to understand, too, the place of the City in the history of his kind and the history of the world. There were many Cities like his City but no two alike, each one unique. Some Cities were mining cities and some Cities were manufacturing cities; some Cities were places where the elderly and infirm went to die in idle leisure. Some Cities were foreign cities on continents far across the shallow seas, where the towers looked like huge stone blocks and were built of bricks or carved into the sides of mountains. Subject often longed to see these places himself. By his second fertility cycle he had traveled beyond his own City of Sky to its northern trading partners, the sandstone-red City of Culling and the smoky-black City of Immensity, and back again, and he knew he would never travel farther except under extraordinary and unlikely circumstances. He learned that he liked traveling. He liked the way he felt waking to a cold morning on the plains. He liked the shadows of rocks at nightfall.

His fertility cycles meant little to him. In his lifetime, he knew, he might make only one or two real contributions to the City’s genetic continuity, his viral gametes combining with others in the bodies of the night feeders to become morphologically active. It was abstractly pleasing, though, to realize he had cast his own essence into the ocean of probability, where it might come floating back, unknown to him, as a fresh citizen with new and unique ideas and odors. It made him think of the long span of history he had learned in the lyceum. The City was ancient. The story of his people was long and cadenced.

They had learned a great deal in their millennia, roused by nature to a sleepy inquisitiveness and the making of things with their fingers. They learned the ways of rocks and soil, wind and rain, numbers and nothingness, stars and planets. Somewhere on the nearest moon of UMa47/E was the ruin of a City his ancestors had built—in the culmination of one particularly inventive cycle—and then abandoned as unsustainable and unnatural. They had distilled the essences of atoms. They had built telescopes that tested the limitations of atmosphere, metals, and optics. They had listened to the stars for messages and received none.

And long ago (Marguerite imagined Tessa’s widened eyes) they had built subtle and almost infinitely complex quantum calculators that had explored the nearest inhabited worlds (
just like we did at Crossbank
, she imagined Tess saying,
just like at Blind Lake
!). And they learned what we’re learning now: that sentient technologies give birth to wholly new kinds of life. They had discovered worlds more ancient and worlds younger than their own, worlds on which the same pattern had recurred. The lesson was obvious.

The machines they had built dreamed deep into the substance of reality and, dreaming, found others like themselves.

It was, the Subject believed, a cycle of life far slower but just as inevitable as the life cycle of his own people: a drama of creation, transformation, and complexity played out over millions of years.

Subject imagined it often: the great days of the Stargazing Cities, their quantum telescopes, and the structures that had been born and grown in staggered lines across the surface of the planet, structures like nothing his species had built or contemplated building, structures like huge ribbed crystals or enormous proteins, structures which one might enter but not easily leave, structures that were conduits into the living machinery of the universe itself, structures which were, themselves, in some sense, alive.

(Structures like this one, Marguerite understood.)

But the Subject had never expected to see one of these structures for himself. No City had been fostered near one for centuries. Subject and his kind had learned to avoid the structures, had dismissed them as doors into chambers that defied comprehension. They built their Cities elsewhere and curbed their curiosity.

Still, Subject had often wondered about the structures. It was disturbing but intriguing to think of his species as an intermediary between the thoughtless night feeders and creatures who spanned the stars.

Apart from these occasional feelings his life had a healthy sameness, a cyclical routine that was rounded, complete, and satisfying. He replaced a dying toolmaker at a busy manufactory and served his City well. His hours were satisfyingly self-similar. At the end of each day he constructed an ideogram to represent what he had felt, thought, seen, and scented during his work cycle. The ideograms were almost identical, like his days, but like his days, no two were alike. When he had covered his chamber completely with ideograms he memorized the sequence and then washed the walls in order to begin again. In his life he had memorized twenty complete sequences.

If this sounds dull (Marguerite imagined herself telling Tess), it wasn’t. The Subject, like all of his kind, was often motionless for long periods of time, but he was never inert. His stillness was rich with savored stimuli: the smells of dawn and dusk, the texture of stone, the subtleties of the seasons, the way memory informed silence until silence became bountifully full. At times he felt a strange melancholy, which others of his kind said was an atavistic remnant of his life as a thoughtless night-feeder—we would call it
loneliness
; he felt it when he looked out from the spiral roads of his home tower across the many towers of the city, to the irrigated fields green and moist and the dry plains where wind whirled dust into the whitening sky. It was a feeling like
I want, I want
, a wanting without an object. It always passed quickly, leaving an aftertaste of sadness, piquant and strange.

Then, one day, a new feeling overwhelmed him.

Civilizations that give birth to star structures are never quite the same. (
Yes, that means us, too: I don’t know how much we’ll be changed, Tess, only that we’ll never be what we were before this century
.) When we first began to look at UMa47/E, the star structures were aware of us. They felt Blind Lake, our O/BECs, the presence of what must have seemed to them a childlike new mentality (
I don’t know if they called her Mirror Girl
); they knew we were watching the Subject, and before long the Subject knew it, too. We became a presence in his mind. (
Have they taught you the Uncertainty Principle in school yet, Tess? Sometimes just observing a thing changes its nature. We can never look at a thing unlooked-at or see a thing unseen. Do you understand
?)

At first the Subject conducted his life as before. He knew we were watching, but it was irrelevant. We were distant in time and space; we meant nothing to the City of Sky. We registered only as a quaver in his daily glyphs, like a distant unfamiliar scent.

But we began to come between the Subject and the thing he loved the most.

Because of their strange phylogenesis, the Subject’s people never mated among themselves, never bonded in pairs, never fell in love with one another. Their overarching epigenetic loyalty was to the City into which they were born. Subject loved the City both in the abstract—as the product of numberless centuries of cooperative effort—and for itself: for its dusty alleys and high corridors, its sunny towers, its dimly lit food wells, its daily chorus of footsteps and soothing silences at night. The City was sometimes more real to him than the people who inhabited it. The City fed and nurtured him. He loved the City and felt loved in return.

(But we set him apart, Tess. We made him different, and it was a difference others of his kind easily sensed. Because we watched him, and because he knew it, he was suddenly in a different kind of relationship with the City of Sky; he felt estranged from it, set apart, suddenly alone in a way he had never been alone before. [
That’s right: alone because we were with him
!] He saw the City as if through different eyes, and the City, his peers, looked differently at him.)

It made him unhappy. He thought more and more often about the star structures.

The star structures had seemed almost a legend to him, a story made by the telling. Now he understood that they were real, that the conversations between the stars were continuous, and that chance had elected him as a representative of his species. He began to consider traveling to the nearest of the structures, which was nevertheless a great distance away in the western desert.

It was unusual for a person of his age to make such a pilgrimage. It was widely believed that entering a star structure would cause the pilgrim to be assumed into a larger intelligence—an unappealing fate for the young, though the elderly and dying were sometimes moved to make the journey. Subject began to feel that his destiny had been tied to the star structures, and he began planning his own voyage, idly at first, more seriously as he was ostracized for his strangeness, ignored at food conclaves, and treated perfunctorily at his work. What else was there for him to do? The City had fallen out of love with him.

He loved the City nevertheless, and it hurt him terribly to say good-bye to it. He spent an entire night alone on a high balcony, savoring the City’s unique pattern of lightness and dark and the subtle, moving moon shadows in the thoroughfares. It seemed to him he loved all of it at once, every stone and cobble, well and cistern, sooty chimney and fragrant green field. His only consolation was that the City would go on without him. His absence might lightly wound the City (he would have to be replaced), but the wound would quickly heal and the City in its benevolence would forget he had ever lived. Which was as it should be.

It was easy for him to locate the star structure. Evolution had equipped the Subject and his kind with the ability to sense subtle variations in the planet’s magnetic field: north, south, east, and west were as obvious to him as “up and down” are obvious to us. The name they had given the star structure contained four suspirated vowels that defined its location with as much precision as a GPS device. But he knew the walk would be long and taxing. He ate as much as he could, storing moisture and nutrients in the linings of his body. He traveled conservative distances each day. He saw things that provoked his curiosity and admiration, including the dune-bound ruin of a City so ancient it had no name, a City abandoned eons before his birth. He rested often. Nevertheless, by the end of the journey, he was weak, dehydrated, confused, and bereft.

(
I think he pitied me, Tess, for never having loved a City, just as I was tempted to pity him for never having loved a fellow creature
.)

When he found the star structure it seemed less awesome than he had anticipated, a strange but dusty agglutination of ribs and arches at the core of which, he knew, there had once been a quantum processor, a machine his ancestors had built at the zenith of their cleverness. Was this really his destiny?

He understood more when he stepped inside.

(
Some of this I can’t explain, Tess. I don’t know how the star structures do what they do. I don’t really know what Mirror Girl means when says she has “sisters in the stars” and that this structure was one of them. I think there are matters here which are terribly difficult for a human mind to grasp
.)

Subject understood that what waited for him deeper in the structure was an apotheosis of some kind—his physical death, but not an end to his being.

Before that happened, however, he was curious about us, perhaps as curious as we had been about him.

That was why Mirror Girl brought me to him. To say hello. To tell a story. To say good-bye.

(
A story like this story. Does that make any sense, Tess? I wish it had a better ending. And I’m sorry about all the big words
.)

It was almost night on the western plains. The sky beyond the arches was blue silk turning to black, and blackness grew like a living thing in the canyons and under the east-facing terraces of rock. Marguerite felt curiously sleepy, as if the aftermath of shock had drained all energy from her.

The Subject had finished his story. Now he wanted to finish his journey. He wanted to go to the core of the star structure and find whatever waited for him there. Marguerite felt his urge to turn away and was suddenly reluctant to let him go.

She said to Mirror Girl, “Can I touch him?”

A pause. “He says yes.”

She put her hand out and took a step forward. Subject remained motionless. Her hand looked pale against the textured roughness of his skin. She rested her fingers against his body above the oral vent. His skin felt like pliant, sun-warmed tree bark. He towered over her, and he smelled perfectly awful. She steeled herself and looked into his blank white eyes. Seeing everything. Seeing nothing.

“Thank you,” she whispered. And: “I’m sorry.”

Ponderously, slowly, the Subject turned away. His huge feet on the sandy soil made a sound like dry leaves rustling.

When he had vanished into the shadowy inner reaches of the star structure, Marguerite—sensing that her time here was almost at an end—knelt down next to Mirror Girl.

How strange, she thought, to see this thing, this
entity
, in the shape of Tess. How misleading.

“How many other intelligent species have you known? You and your sisters?”

Mirror Girl cocked her head to the side, another Tess-like gesture. “Thousands and thousands of progenitor species,” she said. “Over millions and millions of years.”

“Do you remember them all?”

“We do.”

Thousands of sentient species on worlds circling thousands of stars. Life, Marguerite thought, in almost infinite variety. All alike. No two alike. “Do they have anything in common?”

“A physical thing? No.”

“Then, something intangible?”

“Sentience is intangible.”

“Something more than that.”

Mirror Girl appeared to consider the question. Consulting her “sisters,” perhaps.

“Yes,” she said finally. Her eyes were bright and not at all like Tessa’s. Her expression was solemn. “Ignorance,” she said. “Curiosity. Pain. Love.”

Marguerite nodded. “Thank you.”

“Now,” Mirror Girl said, “I think you need to go help your daughter.”